NMS: The Next Adventurer

NMS: THE NEXT ADVENTURER

FOUR: RADIANT PILLAR REPAIRED

The traveller walked up the short ramp that lead to the door of a portable shelter, the metal ringing out with every footstep. Placing vis hand upon the central bump, an opening mechanism was activated and the door split in two, one side sliding to the left and other other to the right.

Inside was a simple bed and, more importantly, a working fabricator. The traveller layed a gloved hand on the touchscreen, and text began to scroll across it. “No-one...making this record in case….leaving behind….in the fabricator...might be of some use...visor damaged...can’t find ship…”. With that, the message ended and the fabricator whirred into life, spitting out a hermetic seal. Just what was needed to continue with the repairs of the Radiant Pillar.

The traveller exited the shelter and as ve began the long trek back to the ship, ve pondered on the message stored in the fabricator. The log had spoken of one whose plight was uncannily similar to the traveller; crashed in the same vicinity, suffering the same kind of damage and equipment failure. The coincidence was just too remarkable but the traveller’s foggy memory permitted no solution to this mystery.

Making vis way up the many hills of this rugged landscape, the traveller followed the homing signal of the Radiant Pillar. Then, upon approaching one of the many giant, red-leafed plants that grew here, the traveller stopped for a closer examination.

The leaf had been neatly cut, as though some enormous pair of sheers had been used upon it. The traveller remembered the giant mantis and its pincers. Could it…?

With that, something down in the valley caught the traveller’s attention. Down there, scuttling around on six legs, was a huge crab. From its top and sides there sprouted three red bony crests and its eyes bobbed about on the end of stalks. As the traveller watched, the giant crab took a huge leaf in its pincer, feeding the vegetation into its mouth with surprising deftness. Had the mantis been herbivorous too? From the way it had homed in on the traveller, it seemed unlikely. The plant-eating crab looked well armoured but then that might explain the formidable weaponry of the mantis: an evolutionary arms race between predator and prey.

By the time the traveller had made it back to the crashed ship, the sun had sunk below the horizon and the stars had come out. Beneath the pale light of a neighbouring planet, the traveller fitted the hermetic seal and then ran diagnostics in order to determine the next course of action.

The ship’s vertical takeoff system was damaged and would require pure ferrite for its repair. Ferrite was no problem to gather, as there as loads of it in rocks littering this land. But none of it was purified. Fortunately, the ship came with a portable refiner. The traveller filled it with raw ferrite and then retired to the safety of the ship’s cockpit, falling asleep while the refiner worked through the night.

The next morning, the traveller opened up the refiner to find it had successfully purified the ferrite. In the skies above, three flying creatures soared through the chilly morning ear. “Just a few more repairs”, the traveller thought, “and I, too, can fly away from here”.

The traveller went back to working on the ship’s damaged parts. By the time the sun was riding high in the sky, the work was complete. Now, ve was a traveller with a means of journeying beyond this planet. The thought connected on a deep level, as though journeying out to the stars was integral to the traveller’s very being. Climbing into the cockpit, the still of the morning was interrupted by the roar of the Radiant Pillar’s engines firing up…

The adventure continued.

Thanks to Hello Games for the images.